It returns
upon that again; if Anna's own life were really fashioned, Vronsky's
effect would be _there_, and the independent effect he happens to
make, or to fail to make, on the reader would be an irrelevant affair.
Tolstoy's vital failure is not with him, but with her, in the prelude
of his book.
It may be that there is something of the same kind to be seen in
another of his novels, in Resurrection, though Resurrection is more
like a fragment of an epic than a novel. It cannot be said that in
that tremendous book Tolstoy pictured the rending of a man's soul by
sudden enlightenment, striking in upon him unexpectedly, against his
will, and destroying his established life--and that is apparently the
subject in the author's mind. It is the woman, the accidental woman
through whom the stroke is delivered, who is actually in the middle of
the book; it is _her_ epic much rather than the man's, and Tolstoy did
not succeed in placing him where he clearly meant him to be. The man's
conversion from the selfishness of his commonplace prosperity is not
much more than a fact assumed at the beginning of the story. It
happens, Tolstoy says it happens, and the man's life is changed; and
thereafter the sombre epic proceeds. But the unrolling of the story
has no bearing upon the revolution wrought in the man; that is
complete, as soon as he flings over his past and follows the convoy of
prisoners into Siberia, and the succession of strange scenes has
nothing more to accomplish in him.
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